As a child in rural Minnesota and North Dakota, Michael Mercil grew up amid farms and livestock.

“I was surrounded by that life,” he said, “although I didn’t grow up on a farm.”

Mercil, 58, an assistant professor of art at Ohio State University, explores the relationship between humans and the animals they grow for food in the premiere of Covenant, tonight at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

“The bottom line for me is, given that farm animals have become virtually invisible in our daily experience,” Mercil said, “when we talk about farm animals, can we know what we are talking about?"

Mercil will introduce the movie, his first outside of a few short films. Afterward, he will participate in a panel discussion with Jeff Dickinson, executive director of the Stratford Ecological Center in Delaware County, and Laurel Braitman, a science historian and writer and doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The movie is part of the “Field and Screen” series at the Wex.

Trained as a sculptor, Mercil has explored agriculture in his art, in part to salute OSU’s roots as a land-grant university that teaches agriculture.

In his 2006-08 project The Beanfield, based on the garden tended by Henry David Thoreau in Walden — Mercil planted beans in a 500-square-foot plot at the Wexner Center.

In 2008, he turned The Beanfield into The Virtual Pasture, with grass, a whiteboard fence and a video monitor of his flock of sheep as they frolicked at Stratford. Once a month, the animals would visit the plot.

Despite being raised in the country, Mercil’s experience with animals was limited to competitive horseback riding and keeping a pet chicken in a boarding-school locker. (“It didn’t last very long,” he said.)

As he explored agriculture through art, he discovered that his knowledge was limited.

“I thought the only way to teach about agriculture was to become involved.”

As his three-critter flock grew to 15, Mercil and his animals confronted problems a farmer would face, such as losing animals to health problems and coyote attacks.

“Many of the questions and experiences a farmer would have,” Mercil said, “became questions and experiences for myself.”

The inspiration for Covenant came from people who visited The Virtual Pasture and repeatedly asked the same question about his sheep: What kind of animal is that?

“I decided to take the question seriously,” he said, “because it revealed to me how alien the farm animals had become to people’s everyday experience.”

And though he had grown more comfortable with agriculture, his filmmaking skills needed work. So Mercil and his small crew spent three years filming at farms throughout Ohio.

“I spent the first year learning that I didn’t know how to make a film,” Mercil said with a laugh. “I spent the second year learning how to make the film and the third year making the film.”

Covenant, Mercil said, gives farmers a chance to speak about the animals they care for every day. It also creates, he said, “context for us who are not farmers to question our own assumptions about the relationships of farmers to their animals and what our relationship to the farmers and animals also are.”

The movie is structured around stanzas of Slaughter, a poem by Susan Stewart based on a farm manual about butchery.

“Because butchery is that moment when the farm animals becomes food, I call that the vexation of our relationship to these animals,” Mercil said. “That’s clearly how our relationship to these animals is different from pets or wildlife. We hunt wildlife, that’s true, but wildlife is not domesticated as food.”

There are no slaughter scenes, said Mercil, who noted that some descriptive language in the film might not be suitable for young children.

As Americans move away from farming, they lose contact with the animals that feed them, he said.

“I see farm animals as an in-between animal,” he said. “We are at a place now in the United States where we tend to sentimentalize our relationship to animals that are closest to us, which is our pets. We can become equally sentimental about those farthest away, which are wild animals.

“The condition of most farm animals now is they are enclosed in covered livestock sheds. They are literally invisible to us — out of sight, out of mind — yet these are animals who supply an enormous portion of our food.”